Top Ten

[cinemabon]

Certainly somebody had to start this thread... it's that time.

For me, the best film of 2005 is...

1. Good Night and Good Luck - I only hope it is not over shadowed by my second pick

2. Brokeback Mountain - I put it high on the list although I still haven't seen it yet. (Looks like Heath's year)

3. Munich - Speilberg is back in the frey, making up for War of the Worlds

4. King Kong - I still like this film, although I know many on this site do not. Jackson deserves the credit.

5. History of Violence - generated more talk this year than practically any film

6. The Constant Gardener - underrated work of art

7. The Chronicals of Narnia - sorry, I'm a huge fan of the genre

8. Lords of Dogtown - Did I mention I used to live in Venice Beach? (Ledger rides again!)

9. The Squid and the Whale - too close to home

10. Syriana - probably the most controversial film of the season

[tabuno]

I understand your selections for top movies and solid reasons can be put forth for each of them. I'm glad to see Munich (that was left out for Best Picture by the Golden Globes), History of Violence , and Chronicles of Naria that was felt was more intimate and personal than Harry Potter this year.

As for Syriana , I can sympathize with the politically correct (against big oil) statement in this movie and I don't know if this movie is so much as controversial (as any might be), the same could be argued for Crash, Munich , even Brokeback Mountain. The script and plot outline for George Clooney, even though he received a best supporting acting nod from the Golden Globes for Syriana was for me an unbelievable character however it was performed that didn't rise to the level of my expectations for this role and actually took it out of the running for my top ten list, along with the confusing, diffused storylines that I thought were one too many and stretch the movie too thin in plot development compared to Traffic (2000).

King Kong has strong support from many critics and public audience members, however, it just doesn't hold up under close cinematic examination and severely lowers the bar for future movies - it doesn't help enhance the quality of movies when this movie could have been so much better in terms of performances and script coherence and emotional drama.

Good Night, and Good Luck was hurt by the inclusion of the employment couple subplot that detracted from the movie without adding anything. However, I wholly support, David Strathairn's nomination for best actor by the Golden Globes, he didn't a masterful job.

I really can't comment on the other films such as I didn't see them.

[wpqx]

I hardly consider The Constant Gardener underrated. The film got great reviews from nearly every source. Matter of fact I found it overrated. I'm always suspicious of doing these lists at year's end, considering many of the best films (persumably) still haven't been released. Having not seen the New World, Match Point, or Munich I can't necessarily say my list is solid, but have seen more than enough of your picks to criticize, and likewise my list contains plenty of films that probably wouldn't make most people's lists. I found it amazing this year that the best films all seemed to come out earlier in the year. I've included two films from 2004 just because they weren't released in the US, or at least in Chicago until well into 2005.

1. Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quintin Tarantino)
I'm amazed this film hasn't shown up on more critics top ten lists this year. I mean to me this set the bar so ridiculously high for comic book movies (and what can be done on a green screen) that I fear no film derived from graphic novel or comic origins can ever measure up. It is graphically violent noir with humor, sexuality, and just downright entertaining. Rodriguez who seemed a little lost in recent years more than makes up for any Shark Boy and Lava Girl with this masterful stroke of genius, and who knew Frank Miller could direct?

2. Serenity (Joss Whedon)
One almost has to see Firefly to truly appreciate this film. Without the series the movie is great, but with that nearly 14 hours of extra character development, you can really appreciate the evolution of the story. You can cheer River finding her own, you can lament the death of Wash, and you can relax that for once Simon acts like a man. This is a movie masterfully shot, and tragic at the same time, not so much for the character we lost, but for the end of the Firefly saga, one that should have lasted much longer. I can only hope that the DVD world will be kind to this, just as they have to Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. Arguably the best directing debut I've seen in a long time (Miller notwithstanding)

3. Crash (Paul Haggis)
Speaking of directorial debuts, Paul Haggis less than a month away from his Oscar win for the Million Dollar Baby script makes his own forray into feature films as a director. It is very tough to pull off the subgenre of the ensemble picture, and although Sin City was one of a much smaller nature, Crash is a sprawling world of entertwining lives and characters where nearly every story is brilliantly crafted. Haggis made a monumental film that somehow manages to be subtle.

4. Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright)
Literary adaptations can always be tricky, and remakes are almost always frowned upon, but somehow a film that probably had no business being made wound up in my top five. Joe Wright directs Pride and Prejudice not like a Hollywood player, but as a European auteur. His camera never ceases to move, and his characters particularly Macfayden and Knightley manage to convey such a smoldering passion that you feel will explode at any moment. The romantic film of the year, the period picture of the year, and the best remake of the year.

5. The World (Jia Zhang-ke)
Since seeing this remarkable film I have been witness to two additional Zhang-ke films, and those two films may not be superior but they firmly remind me what a triumph The World is. A story of multiple people isolated and disillusioned in a nation rapidly losing it's identity. Again told with long takes and terrifically subtle acting, this film more than fulfills the prophecy of Zhang-ke being China's most important director working today.

6. Last Days (Gus Van Sant)
After leaving the nearly deserted theater I wondered if I really even enjoyed this film. Coming after the remarkably high mark of Elephant, I wasn't sure if Van Sant had topped himself, or merely repeated what he already accomplished. As I left and over the next few days I realized what a remarkable film this was. One that stayed with me, with indelible imagery, and moments that I will likely never forget. Michael Pitt is an actor I never would have believed in, but he manages to mumble his way to the best performance he's likely to ever give. The music as well is astonishing, in it's own very simple way. I only wish more people could have seen this, for I fear Van Sant may soon return to his career as a Hollywood hack.

7. Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch)
After nearly a decade of sparse production and forgettable films Jarmusch returns with his funniest and possibly best film with this. Bill Murray who seems to make one great film for every bad one, is in top form, and I can scarcely imagine any one else being half as good as him in this film. A modern road movie, with "A stalker in a Taurus". A joyful movie, that I found wonderful.

8. The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulus)
Well I had to wait a year to finally see this film, which had only a one week run in the city of Chicago. After seeing it I knew that Angelopoulus was quite possibly the best filmmaker in the world. I guess it's obvious that I'm a fan of long takes, especially involving intricate camera movments, but Angelopoulus takes that to a new form of art. From the opening shot you know this is classic, and the rest of the film is sprawling, ambitious, and truly emotional.

9. Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
The first great film I saw this year, remains a particular favorite. A depressing tale, that more than matches the prophecy shown by Kore-eda in his previous two features. This man is leading the charge for Japanese cinema, and this film for all it's heartbreaking glory, is one that I'll cherish. Perhaps not as philosophically profound as After Life, but what this film lacks in it's thought provoking abilities it makes up for in emotional weight.

10. Fever Pitch (Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly)
This may not be one of the ten best films this year, but I had to include it, as I made a promise to myself. Fever Pitch seemed corny and far fetched after I left the theater. I enjoyed it, laughed at it, rooted for it, but generally thought it merely decent. But as you may remember this film came out in April, just as baseball was kicking up. I spent the next six months religiously devoted to Chicago's two professional teams, and at nearly every game attended or watched I recalled moments from this movie. And seeing my own White Sox win the world series, much in the way the Red Sox finally pulled through in this movie, it was all the more resonant. Perhaps in time people will be able to love this film as I have, but well there's a lot of hate for Drew Barrymore and more for Jimmy Fallon.

Also worth mentioning
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Kung Fu Hustle
King Kong

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by wpqx
I'm always suspicious of doing these lists at year's end, considering many of the best films (persumably) still haven't been released. Having not seen the New World, Match Point, or Munich I can't necessarily say my list is solid

Yeah. I'm nowhere close to making lists for 2005 for that very reason.

It seems like every year there are more quality films, especially foreigns, docs and independents, on limited release. These films are not playing outside the top 10 metro areas, where most people live. A lot of folks don't have access to the many of the best movies until they come out on video. Moreover, the number of good-to-great films going straight to dvd keeps increasing. Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice has commented regarding the need to give consideration to films like Resnais' Not on the Lips and Jacques Rivette's The Story of Marie and Julien that went straight to dvd. Heck, it's not the ideal way of watching a movie but the present reality is that some great films are only finding distribution through home video. That fact doesn't mean such films must be neglected. (I know I'm being a bit tangential here). I'll try to watch as many 2005 releases as I can within the next month or so. Then I'll post lists for 2005. One thing I can tell you right now is that 2005 was a great year for English-language films: American (Hollywood and outside Hollywood), Brit, and foreigns released in English like Howl's Moving Castle and March of the Penguins.


*I like comments by cinemabon re:Narnia and wpqx re:Fever Pitch that imply our lists are personal and reflect individual predilections. The most surprising thing about the two lists so far isn't any title included, but the word "subtle" associated with Crash, Roger Ebert's favorite movie of 2005 btw.

[tabuno]

I'm an joyous to see your top three movies on your list (Sin City, Serenity, and Crash , the only ones coincidentally that I've seen, except for Feverpitch. While I can say that these movies, except for Crash, are not on my list, I can understand why they would stick out. I enjoyed all of them, though I found some problems with them. I respect your list and feel it's a good.

[arsaib4]

Tabuno: your list is also very good, and I hope that you provide a link to the thread you started earlier, or maybe you could also post your top ten here.

I'm very glad to see that so many specialty films have made the lists so far. Cinemabon's A History of Violence, The Constant Gardener, and Lords of Dogtown will all make mine (I credit Chris Knipp for promoting Dogtown).

Wpqx: I kowtow to you, my friend, for making an attempt to watch Jia's The World and Angelopoulos' The Weeping Meadow. These two Epics are certifiable masterpieces. Glad that you didn't forget about Crash (you too Tabuno), and appreciated its heightened social and emotional complexities. Manohla Dargis also loved Fever Pitch, so I'll make an attempt to watch it.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm glad to see Lords of Dogtown coming up here, thanks for giving me credit for championing it. It will have to go on my best US list and also Mysterious Skin.. also Last Days. I'm not sure about Syriana. I don't think it's successful but I love the kind of movie it tries to be. I haven't seen Munich or Match Point. I like cinemabon's list a lot. wpqx has some original choices and gets credit for remembering some movies others have forgotten already. I have to wait till I get home and go over everything and ponder a bit more--in the Northern California rain--but here are my notes so far toward lists. Don't tell me some of them haven't been released here yet, I know that. Eventually I'll come up with ten of each of the main categories, and I like to have lists of Worst and Most Overrated too. One of my candidates for Most Overrated would have to be A History of Violence:

BEST MOVIES OF 2005

BEST FOREIGN
2046 (Wong Kar Wai)
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard)
Being Julia (István Szabó)
Caché (Michael Haneke)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso)
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda)
The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)

BEST U.S.
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch)
Bubble (Steven Soderbergh)
Capote (Bennett Miller)
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney)
Junebug (Phil Morrison )
Last Days (Gus van Sant)
Lords of Dogtown (Catherine Hardwick)
Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)
Thumbsucker (Mike Mills)

BEST DOCUMENTARIES
Boys of Baraka (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady)
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter)
No Direction Home (Martin Scorsese)

BEST REVIVAL
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)

[arsaib4]

I'll wait for your "official" list to make any comments. In terms of release dates, yes, many haven't opened here yet as you already know. But Being Julia is one film on the list that was released theatrically in 2004.

[Chris Knipp]

Maybe I should put Being Julia in a "should have listed for last year" list. I think I actually saw it in January of this year. But I am still tempted to include not yet released films because so many of my favorites this year are in that category. I will work on that too though. It's a work in progress.

[tabuno]

[Editorial comment: Grumble, grumble, grumble. OK so I posted this on "Favorite Films" Personally, I think that Forum title suits this discussion better. But democratic majority rules. So here's my earlier post].

The Top Movies of 2005
My Personal Best 10 Movies of 2005 plus One

I started out this year believing that 2005 was going to be a pretty bleak or at least a mild year for quality movies and my opinon continued until the fall. But then with the few great movies that came out early in the year and then a number of quality movies that arrived in the winter, 2005 has turned out to be a solid year for significant, memorable movies. My list is based on several criteria - emotional intimacy, social impact, compelling comedy and/or drama. My list contains some art films but also some popular mainstream films rarely considered by critics or film buffs. Hopefully I've been able to pick out a good representation of each film categories.

1. North Country (2005). This powerful, compelling, and intimately involving movie regarding a woman miner played by Charlize Theron and first sexual harrassment class action lawsuit is consistently dramatic and inspirationally awesome in its performances and script. Place in the top ten of my most favorite movies of all time for its intensity, sincerity to its subject matter, and no holds barred manner in its presentation without cute, playful overplaying or exaggerated melodrama. Hits the perfect notes of great cinema.

2. Crash (2005). A hard-hitting ensemble movie involving the constant theme of racial stereotyping and hatred and the deadly consequences and the deeply emotional revelations of human relationships. This movie resembles Traffic (2000) in its harsh, penetrating action drama approach. This is Sandra Bullock's best performance to date.

3. Munich (2005). A powerful dramatic revenge thriller directed by Spielberg of Israeli efforts to assassinate those Palestinians who murdered their Olympic athletes in Munich. This is the tense, serious, personal story of a man whose government has him go undercover to kill these men.

4. Jarhead (2005). Among the best war movies - portraying the emotional underbelly of war starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Foxx. Like Black Hawk Down (2001) meets Lost in Translation (2003), this movie brings home the real feel of war in its most usual experience for many soldiers. An important experience for the lay public and our understanding of the life of our military overseas.

5. The Chronicles of Naria: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (2005). A fabulously looking, sincere, and well performed children's fantasy movie. The evil witch is one of the most memorable evil fantasy characters yet delivered on screen. The intimate characterization of the children, particularly among the brothers, the larger than life and powerful presentation of this fantasy provides both a strong subtext of intimate personal character development and conflict along with the larger political battle between armies.

6. Prime (2005). Likely the most wittiest, funniest and most sincere romantic comedies of the year. Starring Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep, has Meryl, a therapist, seeing Uma who begins a love relationship with Meryl's son in the movie. Unlike other more raunchy, sexist comedies this year, this comedy stands out for its sincerity and integrity to both humor, duel client/therapist relationships and personal family relationships.

7. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005). May be on the best young adult movies of the past several years, up their with Stand By Me (1986) and The Breakfast Club (1985). The movie has grat openness, addressing the emotional and psychological issues of growing up and are presented with sincere intensity.

8. Elektra (2005). Jennifer Garner's solo starring performance (after Daredevil) in a qualitatively superior superhero movie that offers excellent martial art scenes along with a strong, emotional, sensitive female storyline. This movie emphasizes substance and style, finesse with a strong fantasy backdrop over special effects and epic proportion, power and strength that I feel is even more potent that this year's more well-received Batman Begins.

9. Sin City (2005). A great looking live action graphic novel adaptation that brings into virtual reality the animated character drama of the imaginary fifties of male violence, strong women, and big heart only slowed down by unnecessary attempt to fill the screen with too many storylines.

10. The Weatherman (2005). A strong drama about a television weather man played by Nicolas who is going through the disruptive experience of divorce, his attempts a reconciliation, coping with challenging children, and a father played by Michael Caine who himself undergoes a life-altering experience. This movie is a Lost in Translation with substance, dramatic plot and deals sincerely and mostly honestly with its subject matter.

Honorable Mention

The History of Violence (2005). An apparently ordinary husband, father, and owner of a small town café becomes a hero that brings with it a mysterious man who threatens the man's rather ordinary but happy life. This is a graphically violent movie with strong sexual depictions that however bring to the screen a powerful issue about a person's life and connection to the past.

Other movies worthy of commendatory recognition include:

Good Night, and Good Luck, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Perfect Man, What the Bleep Do We Know?, The Ice Princess, Aeon Flux, Unleashed, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Elizabethtown

To be fair, I cannot say that I've had an opportunity or personal interest in seeing many other movies of potential award winning honors including:

Broken Flowers
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Cinderella Man
The Constant Gardener
The Corpse Bride
Howls Moving Castle
Enron
Kingdom of Heaven
Layer Cake
Millions
Murderball
The New World
Pride and Prejudice
Proof
Rent
Shopgirl
The Squid and the Whale
2046
The Upside of Anger
Wallace and Gromit

[Howard Schumann]

1. No Direction Home
Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home brings it all back home and allows us to relive those days when the world seemed ready to embrace a new morning. No Direction Home follows the career of Bob Dylan from his childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota to his motorcycle accident in 1966, highlighting the most creative years in his life and offering previously unseen footage of Dylan as a young man. It brings to life the promise of that period featuring concert performances by Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger Dave van Ronk, including scenes from the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963, 64, and 65 when Pete Seeger almost cut the chords on an electric Dylan. There is great music in the entire film and it is uplifting and wonderful but may be remembered only for its opening act, the act in which Dylan called us to greatness but denied his own.

2. Nobody Knows

Hirokazu Kore'eda's Nobody Knows is a film of deep compassion about four young children abandoned by their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. Based on a real incident in 1988, the film was written, directed, produced, and edited by Kore'eda whose earlier films were introspective meditations on life and death. Though his latest film is primarily a coming-of-age film about the transformation of a pre-adolescent boy, no film I've seen in recent memory has filled me with as much sadness for the failure of modern society to provide a coherent set of values for people. While there have been other films about the alienation of big city life, they tend to be cold and impersonal and convey an emotional deadness. Such is not the case here where the children's natural vivacity and warmth make their closeness to each other more real and ultimately all the more heartbreaking.

3. Mysterious Skin

In Gregg Araki's powerful drama, Mysterious Skin, eight-year old Brian (George Webster) accounts for missing time by confabulating it with stories of alien abductions and sets out on a path to uncover long suppressed memories. This is not a film about alien abductions, however, but about inappropriate sexual seduction of children and its deleterious effect on their development. While it is often graphic and difficult to watch, it is a sensitive film, held together by authentic and heartfelt performances by Joseph-Gordon Levitt as Neil and Brady Corbet as Brian that allow us to connect with their open wounds. Mysterious Skin is an honest and compelling film in which there are no good guys and bad guys, just flawed people who act out their deep-seated needs in a harmful way.

4. The Holy Girl

The Holy Girl is a film in which the combination of budding adolescent sexuality and Catholic Sunday School sermonizing leads to confusion and trouble. Similar in style to Alain Cavalier's masterful Thérése, another film about religious fervor, The Holy Girl is an extremely intimate series of minimalist vignettes in which the story unfolds in glimpses and whispered conversations, in "a slow reverie of quick moments". There is no approval or disapproval of behavior, only a snapshot of events that the viewer is left to interpret. The Holy Girl is elusive and somewhat disorienting, yet it remains an extraordinary achievement, full of intensity and crackling tension, true to the way people act when they are dealing with feelings bubbling beneath the surface.

5. Caché

Austrian director Michael Haneke's spine-tingling Hitchcock-like thriller, Cache is a metaphor for the denial of French responsibility for the treatment of Algerians in its colonial past and its current treatment of immigrants. It is not until several minutes into the film, however, that we realize we are watching videotape sent by unknown persons to the family of Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil). Haneke is masterful in showing the murk that is hidden beneath the outward calm of our comfortable middle-class lives, a recurring theme in many of his films. The mystery of who sent the tapes increases as Haneke builds an unrelenting atmosphere of imminent danger in a low-key manner without the use of foreboding music or special effects. Caché is a superbly crafted, entertaining, and challenging film that makes us painfully aware of the consequences of the lack of individual responsibility and creepy paranoia of modern life and of Western arrogance toward people considered inferior.

6. Turtles Can Fly

Kurdish director Bohman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly, is a view of war from the inside of a Kurdish refugee camp close to the Iraq-Turkish border just prior to and during the U.S. invasion. There is no overt political message, yet the hundreds of parentless children in the film, many with broken limbs from exploding landmines, tell a story of war that transcends politics. The children live in a world that has no electricity and no schools and where watching television with a satellite dish is a luxury, especially when many of the channels are forbidden. Ghobadi's film is both a celebration of the innocence of children and a warning about the dangers they face from dictators, fascists, and over-zealous democrats. Far better than any CNN or El Jazeera news account possibly could relate, the story of the war is written in their soulful faces.
.
7. The Merchant of Venice

William Shakespeare's controversial The Merchant of Venice is set in 16th century Venice and director Michael Radford relies on setting, mood, and realism to tell its story, rejecting lavish period costumes or a modern setting with rock music to appeal to a wider audience. Pacino's performance of Shylock, a Jewish moneylender and his bond to extract a pound of flesh from the wealthy merchant Antonio brings new vigor to the text and his often over-the-top persona is replaced with a gentler, more understated demeanor that brings understanding to his cause. Radford slices the play's three-hour length to a manageable two hours and eight minutes and also provides some historical background. Although the play is primarily a drama of hatred and revenge, there are touches of broad comedy as well. Shylock is definitely a caricature, but he is an ambiguous figure and there are many indications that Shakespeare views his flaws as human failings, not Jewish ones.

8. Crash

Urban society breeds fear, intolerance and lack of trust, especially of strangers of different ethnic backgrounds whom we see as potential threats rather than as people with problems similar to our own. In Crash, Paul Haggis has the vision to see the thread of common humanity that connects us beyond the socially conditioned fear. Crash is divided into several episodes and, as it unfolds, seemingly unrelated threads intersect to form a connection. Haggis has assembled an outstanding ensemble cast that includes Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillipe and all are first rate. Though the film is gritty and confrontational, the music by Kathleen "Bird" York alleviates some of the shock and nastiness and reminds us that there is a divine melody always playing in the background of our lives. In his first directorial effort, Haggis has given us a crash course in confronting stereotypes and looking beyond outward appearances to see the humanity that people are capable of.

9. C.R.A.Z.Y.

Authentic and wildly inventive, Quebecois director Jean Marc-Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. covers a period of thirty years in the life of a suburban Catholic family and has a remarkable feeling for the era. Born on Christmas Day, 1960 Zachary Beaulieu is the second youngest of five sons. The adult Zac narrates the film and we see the world through his eyes as he learns to be true to himself the hard way. He tells us that the reason why he has always hated Christmas is because the holiday always overshadowed his birthday and because the presents he received were not those he really wanted. C.R.A.Z.Y. is more about being different in a conformist society and the struggle for self-awareness rather than just about being gay. As Vallée explains it, "the theme of the film is personal acceptance. It's about this struggle to express yourself and being honest in the moment".

10. Millions

In Millions, Danny Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce have produced a delightful fantasy about children, faith, money, and idealism that sharply contrasts with standard children's movie fare based on fear and simplistic notions of good and evil. Danny Boyle employs enough cinemagic to transport us completely into the world of seven-year old Damian (Alex Etel), a pint-size miracle worker and his older brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) as they cope with disposing of a huge sum of money found near their play area. Actually, no special effects are needed, just being around the children is enough to convince us that there is magic in the world. Alex Etel as Damian turns in one of the best child performances I've come across in a long time. He's got a lot to handle in this film and pulls it off with much aplomb, allowing us to appreciate his generosity and compassion and be captivated by his wide-eyed innocence and charm.

11. Darwin's Nightmare

Slavery, colonization, genocide and civil war have marked the history of Africa. In Hubert Sauper's powerful documentary Darwin's Nightmare, we witness the latest humiliation -- globalization, euphemistically called the New World Order. Darwin's Nightmare is about fish, specifically the Nile Perch in Tanzania's Lake Victoria, but the theme is the exploitation of the natural resources of one country for the benefit of others. In this case, 500 tons of white fillets are caught each day, then exported to Europe to feed two million people each day while the villagers who cannot afford the perch are forced to live on the heads and carcasses that the factories have discarded. Darwin's Nightmare takes a strong stand but does not preach even though its images are often painfully direct. One of the most memorable scenes is of an African woman standing in the sun among the rotting fish carcasses and maggots claiming that her life is better than others, even though one eye has been clearly destroyed by ammoniac gases. This isn't Darwin's nightmare, it's our own.

12. Ae Fond Kiss

After a fracas at school in which a young Muslim girl is being chased by bullies, Roisin Hanlon (Eva Birthisle), a spunky young Irish woman who teaches music meets and begins a relationship with Casim Khan (Atta Yaqub), a Pakistani disc jockey in Glasgow clubs. Ae Fond Kiss is the third in the Glasgow series by director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Lavery. It is much lighter in tone than his previous films and is basically a romantic drama, though it has a great deal to say about issues of class, race, and religion and does so in a very forthright manner. The parents will not acknowledge that their children are living in a different world or encourage them to make their own choices. Though the story of star-crossed lovers has been told before, it has rarely been related with as much honesty, insight, and beauty.

OTHERS: Moolaade, The Tracker, Walk on Water

[Chris Knipp]

A very distinctive and personal list. Somehow I think Ae Fond Kiss is last year, but you can do what you like; I'm probably going to mention stuff that isn't out yet. Unfortunately I have not seen The Holy Girl, Turtles Can Fly, C.R.A.Z.Y., or Darwin's Nightmare, though I seriously wanted to see The Holy Girl and Darwin's Nightmare. I think The Merchant of Venice is very good, but I might not rate it that high; nor Millions, but the others that I have seen I think are excellent choices, particularly your first five (even though I haven't seen one, it sounded extremely good--somehow it has slipped by so far. Will see it, and Darwin's NIghtmare, definitely. Thank you. I'm still working on mine. I'm glad Caché made your list; it's on mine.

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
A very distinctive and personal list. Somehow I think Ae Fond Kiss is last year, but you can do what you like; I'm probably going to mention stuff that isn't out yet. Unfortunately I have not seen The Holy Girl, Turtles Can Fly, C.R.A.Z.Y., or Darwin's Nightmare, though I seriously wanted to see The Holy Girl and Darwin's Nightmare. I think The Merchant of Venice is very good, but I might not rate it that high; nor Millions, but the others that I have seen I think are excellent choices, particularly your first five (even though I haven't seen one, it sounded extremely good--somehow it has slipped by so far. Will see it, and Darwin's NIghtmare, definitely. Thank you. I'm still working on mine. I'm glad Caché made your list; it's on mine. Thanks. There is a Jan 20th deadline for Cinescene so I have the option of adding or subtracting until then, but this is how it will probably end up. There are some that may be officially 2004 releases, but they opened here (or came out on DVD) for the first time in 2005.

I haven't seen Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, A History of Violence, The Constant Gardener and others so it still might change.

[Chris Knipp]

I haven't seen Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, A History of Violence, The Constant Gardener and others so it still might change. What about Munich? I had to see it, but now that I have, I'm frankly quite disappointed. I also was by The Constant Gardener and (considering all the raves about it) A History of Violence and to a lesser extent by Syriana, but NOT by Good NIght and Good Luck, which holds up I think, has class.

[wpqx]

Well your list Howard has put me to shame, I realize that I might not be as knowledgable as I thought, although one or two films may have been released here in Chicago last year.

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by wpqx
Well your list Howard has put me to shame, I realize that I might not be as knowledgable as I thought, although one or two films may have been released here in Chicago last year. Not all of the films on my list are readily available but hopefully they will all come around in one form or another.

[cinemabon]

Howard, as usual, you bring us all up to another level. I hope one day when I visit my relatives in Seattle I can bop up to Vancouver (where I used to visit back in the 80's) and arrange a visit. I have a feeling that my knowledge about film is miniscule compared with yours. Thank you for every post.

German writer, actor, director, producer Hubert Sauper's "Darwin's Nightmare" was originally released in 2004, but was also entered last year in four different competitions and won. I'm not sure if or when it was shown in LA to qualify for the Oscars. I know someone showed the list on this site. There are several wonderful reviews at IMDB. I'm looking forward to seeing it as the subject matter is something I feel very strongly about. Thank you for adding it to your list and bringing up the subject for discussion.

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by cinemabon
Howard, as usual, you bring us all up to another level. I hope one day when I visit my relatives in Seattle I can bop up to Vancouver (where I used to visit back in the 80's) and arrange a visit. I have a feeling that my knowledge about film is miniscule compared with yours. Thank you for every post. That is a very kind thing to say. Thank you very much. Actually, compared to other denizens of this film board and other boards I frequent, my knowledge of films is rather limited. I hope you get a chance to see Darwin's Nightmare in the near future. It does not present a very pretty picture but it is an important one. Thanks again.

Howard

[Chris Knipp]

CHRIS KNIPP'S MOVIE BEST LISTS FOR 2005


TEN BEST U.S.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (ANG LEE)
BROKEN FLOWERS (JIM JARMUSCH)
CAPOTE (BENNETT MILLER)
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (GEORGE CLOONEY)
GRIZZLY MAN (WERNER HERZOG)
LAST DAYS (GUS VAN SANT)
LORDS OF DOGTOWN (CATHERINE HARDWICK)
MATCH POINT (WOODY ALLEN)
MYSTERIOUS SKIN (GREGG ARAKI)
THUMBSUCKER (MIKE MILLS)


TEN BEST FOREIGN

2046 (WONG KAR WAI)
THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED (JACQUES AUDIARD)
BEING JULIA (ISTVÁN SZABÓ)
THE BEST OF YOUTH (MARCO TULLIO GIORDANA)
CACHÉ (MICHAEL HANEKE)
GAMES OF LAW AND CHANCE (ABDEL KECHICHE)
GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (MARCO BELLOCCHIO)
INNOCENCE (LUCILE HADZIHALILOVIC)
THE INTRUDER (CLAIRE DENIS)
NOBODY KNOWS (HIROKAZU KOREEDA)

BEST UNRELEASED

BUBBLE (STEPHEN SODERBERGH)
THE CHILD (JEAN-PIERRE & LUC DARDENNE)
THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (CRISTI PUIU)
GABRIELLE (PATRICE CHÉREAU)
REGULAR LOVERS (PHILIPPE GARREL)
THE SUN (ALEKSANDR SUKUROV)
THREE TIMES (HOU HSIAU HSIEN)
LOS MUERTOS (LISANDRO ALONSO)


BEST DOCUMENTARIES

[GRIZZLY MAN]
THE BOYS OF BARAKA (HEIDI EWING, RACHEL GRADY)
MONDOVINO (JONATHAN NOSSITER)
NO DIRECTION HOME (MARTIN SCORSESE)


SHORTLISTED, ALL CATEGORIES

CRASH (PAUL HAGGIS)
DOWN TO THE BONE (DEBRA GRANAK)
FORTY SHADES OF BLUE (IRA SACHS)
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (DAVID CRONENGERG)
JUNEBUG (PHIL MORISON)
KINGS AND QUEEN (ARNAUD DESPLECHIN)
KONTROLL (NIMRÓD ANTÁL)
MUNICH (STEPHEN SPIELBERG)
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (NOAH BAUMBACH)
SYRIANA (STEPHEN GAGHAN)


BEST REVIVAL

PROFESSIONE: REPORTER (PASSENGER, 1975, MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI)


YEAR'S MOST OVERRATED

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (DAVID CRONENBERG)
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (MIRANDA JULY)
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (NOAH BAUMBACH)


WISH I'D SEEN

CAFÉ LUMIÈRE (HOU HSIAU HSIEN)
DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE (HUBERT SAUPER)
THE HOLY GIRL (LUCRETIA MARTEL)
MY SUMMER OF LOVE (PAWEL PAWLIKOWSKI)
THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (TOMMY LEE JONES)
TROPICAL MALADY (APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL)
THE WORLD (JIA ZHANG-KE)


On Chris Knipp website. (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=523)

[Chris Knipp]

As you can see, I have trouble narrowing it down, and years ago gave up the idea of a list of only ten when the rest of the world's cinematic production had to be included in a list of ten. We get to see more new American films than anything else, but the rest of the world is stiff competition.

I enjoy a lot of what I see, because even though I watch a lot, I choose carefully what I watch. But I do have opinions, and I don't mind saying when something is overrrated or downright bad. My job as I see it is to be true to my own responses, regardless of what other people think or say.

Some of the best I saw we have to wait for before they'll ever see the dark of a U.S. movie house, because they're coming later, or maybe never, to our theaters: Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Stephen Soderbergh's Bubble and the Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant (all coming) and Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun, Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle, Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers and Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos (without distributors). But what did make it to US screens included some very amusing, spine chilling, or moving stuff.

TEN BEST U.S. (alphabetical)

Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee) is an extraordinary mainstream event: a movie where two young Hollywood hunks (Gyllanhaal and Ledger) play out a heartbreaking doomed gay love affair. Wow! This hit me hardest of all that I saw. Whatever it loses of the hardscrabble pain of Proulx's short story it gains in impact and meaning for ordinary people, and average gay men are thrilled out of their skins. That includes me.

Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch) shows the sardonic auteur working with prince of deadpan Bill Murray, a marriage made in heaven that's dripping with droll feminine vignettes, really a slow feast of choice acting turns.

Capote (Bennett Miller) is Phillip Seymour Hoffman's devastatingly accurate recreation of Truman Capote at work on his cruel, self-destroying "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood. A triumph for the gifted Hoffman.

Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney) is so elegant, so intelligent, you may forget it's a little history lesson about an earlier era of government overreaching. Ed Murrow battling Joe McCarthy. It's lucky that that witty charmer Clooney is also smart, and he's political too, which is even cooler.

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog) is an important documentary portrait that shows the devastating innocence of a man who anthropomorphizes lethal wild beasts. This is very specific about the guy, but it's also about all of us and how we misjudge and misunderstand nature, to our peril.

Last Days (Gus Van Sant) is a stoned visual poem, a hypnotic meditation on youth and death with a surprisingly intense performance by Michael Pitt that completes the Van Sant trilogy begun with Gerry and Elephant and makes up for all Van Sant's dips into mediocrity since My Own Private Idaho.

Lords of Dogtown (Catherine Hardwick) is an accurate and funny and fun portrait of the legends of skateboarding, full of spicy performances, notably Heath Ledger's as druggy coach/sponsor Skip Engblom. This was a breakthrough year for Ledger, whose cred as a serous and selfless actor, no pretty-boy, is now firm.

Match Point (Woody Allen) With this sparkling, enjoyable social climber-cum-Hitchcockian-suspense drama set in London, Woody got himself back on the map. This one isn't like Chinese food. You aren't hungry an hour later; you remember it, thanks to Rhys-Meyers and Johansson's chemistry.

Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki) The formerly wild and silly queer-cinema queen Araki took on a new maturity with this serious story about two victims of pedophilia trying to grow up. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a strong performance. This is tough material handled with imagination and taking us somewhere very dark and real.

Thumbsucker (Mike Mills) shows a fresh light touch with the tired coming-of-age theme.

TEN BEST FOREIGN

2046 (Wong Kar Wai) The most lush and complicated of Wong's period fantasies yet, the end of an epic series. It's so pretty and plot-encrusted it almost makes you sick, but what sweet sickness!

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard). Molding James Toback's first fillm into a rich unclassifiable mix of thriller and portrait-of--failed-artist-as-a-young-man, Audiard gave us one of the most complex and complete films of the year. Another breakthrough for a young actor into serous cred: Romain Duris.

The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana) In-depth decades-spanning family portrait that shows off the Italian sense of time and place and ability to spin a mini-series such as we poor Anglos are starved for.
.
Being Julia (István Szabó) isn't a great movie but it's hilarious Masterpiece Theatre-type fun and a wonderful display of Annette Benning's inexhaustible talent.

Caché (Michael Haneke) Haneke likes to tease and torment us into guilty awarenesses. This is Haneke in top form, with a consistently challenging and original work about responsibility and connectedness
.
Games of Love and Chance (Abdel Kechiche) A brilliant amalgam of French classicism and ghetto angst; not everybody in the US saw this story about love and class by and about French people of Arab descent living outside Paris, but the French gave it their highest award for a reason. It's pretty real, and it's very smart.

Good Morning, Night (Marco Bellocchio) Another surprisingly beautiful visual and auditory poem made out of something very dark. This portrait of a terrorist act, the Aldo Moro kidnapping that tore up Italy in 1978, is seen by Bellocchio from within as a study of moral doubt.

Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic) A terrifyingly consistent, coherent, and beautiful first film that provides a fantastic dreamlike vision of girlhood and oppression.

The Intruder (Claire Denis), Amidst the mostly conventional American movies of the Christmas season, watching Claire Denis' new one was like taking a plunge in cold, fresh water. Pure cinema, without limits or guidelines.

Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda) In this excruciatingly claustrophobic story of abandoned siblings trying to muddle through, Koreeda looks deep into the saddest side of childhood: its helplessness.

There was other good stuff. My shortlist includes Down to the Bone (Debra Granak), Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin), and Kontroll (Nimród Antal). Credit for good intentions has to go to a muddled pair grasping at political significance, Munich (Steven Spielberg) and Syriana (Stephen Gaghan) and to the high-pitched Crash (Paul Haggis).

Besides Grizzly Man, several other documentaries went the extra mile (if not at all as many as last year), notably the muckraking Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter) which exposes egomania and globalization in the wine trade, The Boys of Baraka (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady), about a valiant effort to save Baltimore ghetto youths, and Martin Scorsese's thrilling and seamless portrait of young genius in process of self-creation, the Bob Dylan study, No Direction Home.

The best revival surely was Antonioni's Professione: reporter, starring Jack Nicolson, previously known here (in a U.S. edit) as The Passenger and in retrospect possibly Antonioni's most perfect film, as well as his personal favorite. It's looking very good at the age of 30.

Excellent but still overrated were Cronenberg's A History of Violence (which is better to talk about than to watch), Fernando Moreilles' inappropriately overwrought adaptation of John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener (it was a good year for Ralph Fiennes with that and the swoony Merchant/Ivory swansong, The White Goddess). Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is a good study of kids dealing with a divorce, but not as brilliant as people said. I saw a lot of movies this year, but I'm guessing there still are at least a dozen or so, maybe more, new releases that might have caused a rearrangement of this list, and possibly of my psyche, if I hadn't unfortunately missed them.

[arsaib4]

2046 (WONG KAR WAI) - I was under the impression that you didn't think very highly of it.

THE BEST OF YOUTH (MARCO TULLIO GIORDANA) - Ditto

GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE (ABDEL KECHICHE)

BEST DOCUMENTARIES

What about Mad Hot Ballroom?

WISH I'D SEEN

FATELESS (LAJOS KOLTAI) - This should count as a 2006 release.

[Chris Knipp]

I guess you're right about Fateless--I know it just opened in NYC around January 6th, somehow I thought I'd seen it on somebody's '05 list. My mistake. Good, I didn't lose it, and I look forward to it, it sounds great. Anyway, it's true: I "wish I'd seen" it January 6th, only that was the day I left NYC.

Well with Best of Youth, you have an example of how I bow to public pressure. I saw it in an Italian context, and my Italian teacher and I fell all over each other putting it down, but in retrospect it is pretty great for what it is, and people here loved it, it has stayed in my mind, and I redid my list to consist only of real 2005 US releases of foreign films and that made a space for it.

Mad Hot Ballroom was charming; I guess I thought it was too cute. Thar reminds me that I saw Rize, but I thought Rize was a mess, even though it had some good stuff in it. I would see no harm in including Mad Hot Ballroom. And it seems like it's been made into a fiction movie now with Antonio Banderas, Take the Lead..

Now as for 2046, I just held off on it because Wong is so big to me, and it is so complex, I didn't know what to say about it. Books have practically already been written about it, and the timing became off because I saw it on dvd way before it came out in theaters here, and that way I lose momentum to review a film. I also do think that it's overwrought, and that he's come to a kind of dead end, but it's also incredibly gorgeous and stylistically rich and original, and it would be completely insane not to include it as one of the best foreign films of the year. Sometimes my feelings are complicated; that's one reason why I can't use a grading system and don't rank my Best Lists and just put them in alphabetical order.

[wpqx]

I missed Best of Youth. It played in Chicago on two separate days, but when the theater is an hour away and tickets are $9.25 for each, then I wasn't really motivated enough to see it. Cafe Lumiere was actually released on DVD even though it is getting it's theatrical premiere here in another couple of weeks. Although movies are generally better on the big screen, I think in this case I'll just stick with the DVD, makes my life easier, it's hard enough keeping up with the numerous releases this year.

[Chris Knipp]

After all Best of Youth was basically made for TV, so there's no reason you shouldn't watch it on dvds. I watched it on Italian dvds that were projected on a screen for us. But it's shame to see certain movies that one might get to see on the big screen, any other way. I am aware that I have the time and the means that some don't have to do this, though. I actually saw 2046, Good Morning Night, Games of Love and Chance, and Innocence on dvd. I am glad that I saw Last Days on the big screen, also Caché, The Sun, Los Muertos, L'Enfant, and Bubble. Bubble is still coming, so people can catch it in theaters. But it's made to read both ways.....

[pmw]

CK, what about The Sun?!?! I haven't had time to pull my own list together... will work on it over the weekend.

Peter

[Chris Knipp]

What do you mean, What about The Sun? I love The Sun, but as far as I know it has no US distributor so far. I listed it therefore under BEST UNRELEASED and at the start of my "prose" version of my lists. All my BEST FOREIGN list are films actually released in the US in 2005.

[pmw]

Got it, that makes sense. I thought it had US dist, but looks like it doesn't... NY Film Fest is the only distribution listing on imdb for this classic. That sucks. "Solntse" being the Russian title.

Coming out in France on Feb 1. The lucky French get it.

Getting off topic. Will try and pull my 10 list together.

P

[Johann]

I still gotta lotta catching up to do but so far these films are the "best" I've seen:

Batman Begins
Sin City
The White Diamond - I suspect Grizzly Man will make the list without any twisting of my arm. Herzog is a living cinema legend. Period.

Princess Raccoon
My Dad is 100 Years Old
Manderlay
Dear Wendy
King Kong
Water
Walk the Line

[oscar jubis]

By far the biggest hit at the box office was the French doc March of the Penguins at $77 million. Its combination of previously inaccessible landscapes and compelling story of species survival was unbeatable. March of the Penguins was the single documentary I watched in 2005 that demanded a large screen for full appreciation. The filming itself was quite a feat, giving the harsh conditions and polar setting. Too much has been made by detractors of the arguable flaws of the approach to voice-over commentary. A distant second was Mad Hot Ballroom, with a total box office of about 8 million. The sight of 11 year olds, sons and daughters of immigrants living in NYC, applying themselves to learn different types of dances was uplifting and charming, yet superficial. It's a shame that the flick concentrates so much on the competition aspect and so little on how the kids were transformed by the experience. Towards the end of Mad Hot Ballroom, the principal of the winning P.S. remarks about the transformation of two kids who were on the verge of criminality and gang behavior prior to learning and eventually excelling at dancing. It's a shame the film failed to deal with how the discipline and focus required to perform had an impact on the kids' lives. Consider for instance how Murderball, while dwelling on the winning and losing, kept its focus on the lives of its sportsmen-with-disabilities. One gets a clear idea of how these men emerged from tragedy to become the fierce competitirs of today.
My favorite documentary of 2005 deals with the Rwanda genocide, the UN man who attempted to stop it , and how failure affected him. It balances the political with the personal with uncommon skill, so that one sheds light on the other.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

1.Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (Peter Raymont/Canada)

2.Darwin's Nightmare (Hubert Sauper/Austria-Belgium-France)

RUNNER-UPS

Another Road Home (Danae Elon/USA)
Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (Scorsese/USA)
Death in Gaza (James Miller/UK)
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney/USA)
Grizzly Man (Herzog/USA)
Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard/Fra)
March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet/France)
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (Ken Burns/USA)
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (Keith and Kevin Beauchamp/USA)

HONORABLE MENTION

Murderball (Rubin and Shapiro/USA)

*I think all of these titles are already available on dvd.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for your informed comments. I've got some catching up to do. Of course you mean "biggest hits at the box office" among docs, since that $71 million figure is less than a fifth the $380 million Star Wars II made and a whole bunch of fiction flicks made over $200 mil. I'm sorry I found the syrupy antropomorphizing narration by Morgan Freeman turned me off, way off, on Penguins (the French or other language versions may be quite different, from what I hear) and I ran kicking and screaming to the bleak picture of nature and nature lovers provided in Grizzly Man, which I'm glad to see is also on your list. You're larger-spirited than I am to be able to like them both.

I take it you didn't take so strongly to The Wild Parrots of Telgraph Hill? Not as much of a wow movie but another one that treats not just nature but man's relationship to it (the comparison with Grizzly Man is one that ought to be more explored) -- and you clearly prefer deeper more rounded pictures, your reason for faulting Mad, Hot Ballroom for not exploring enough how the dancers were changed by the competition, an excellent criticism. When they get personal, or when they lose their cool, or when they get so close to their subjects it almost hurts and maybe it changes you and even makes you cry, that's when you realize why documentaries matter, and matter a heck of a lot.

I realized when I saw the Cinescene editor Chris Dashiell's long list (http://www.cinescene.com/dash/snob05.htm) of recommended documentaries for 2005 (scroll down on his page to see it) that I missed a lot and I'll have to catch up, especially on the political ones. It was maybe a bit dumb of me to comment that 2005 wasn't as good a year as 2004 for docs: I may just not have seen enough of them last year and gotten luckier the year before.

Some I see I've missed (not just from this year): Lost Boys of Sudan, The Weather Underground, Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in our Times, Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties, Children Underground, Tell Them Who You Are, Twist of Faith, Henry Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque, La Sierra, The Yes Men, and Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price (most of these are from Dashiell's list).

For their socio-econo-political interest (important to see even if of varying quality), I'd mention The Future of Food, The Boys of Baraka (still coming in some areas) and the quirky, super-thorough Mondovino. And again not the best documenataries in my opinion but important as portraits of artists: Be Here to Love Me: a Film About Townes Van Zandt and William Eggleston in the Real World.

[oscar jubis]

My box office numbers obviously refer only to docs. By the way, Grizzly Man was probably third, at close to $4 million. I found it superior to Herzog's The White Diamond, also a 2005 release. I watched a lot of docs that are worth-watching but didn't make my list. These include The Yes Men, La Sierra, Rock School, Lost Boys of Sudan, and others but not Wild Parrots which played less than a mile from my house and somehow I failed to watch it. It's out on dvd so I'll check it out.
My list includes only docs on regular distribution. Otherwise, Patricio Guzman's Salvador Allende would be my second favorite doc of 2005. It's highly unlikely this Chilean doc will get distribution although it has a lot to say about US foreign policy circa 1973.
Hope to post fiction lists in about a week or so. I've been re-watching favorites that have come out on dvd. So far first impressions are solid, with no major changes of opinion either up or down.
Regarding the narration of Penguins, I read somewhere (I think it was the LA Times but not sure) that the original French version gave distinctive human voices to a few of the birds. Even if I hated Freeman's narration I'd still find the story and the stunning images reason enough to list it among the best of the year.

[Chris Knipp]

If you look up La marche de l'Empereur, as they call it, on IMDb you'll find the actors who do the penguin voices -- Charles Berling and Romane Bohringer, two famous actors, and a teenager, Jules Sitruk. A friend of mine who's French said that the narration was more ironic in the French version. I had a feeling you didn't see The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill or you might have mentioned it. I would never list a documentary that had a crummy narration, no matter how stunning the cinematography was. Not when the narration is constant. Admit it, you didn't mind the narration as much as I did. You mention a foreign doc, and that's interesting, we don't really get that many of them, and when we do it's usually something soft like the Penguins or the one about the birds migrating, both oddly enough French. I'd say the US doc industry is very strong now though. "Even if I hated Freeman's narration I'd still find the story....." no, the story is the narration, in this case, you can't separate them that way.

[oscar jubis]

I disagree when you say "the story is the narration". Most of the story, here and in the best films, is conveyed via images. Mostly the narration fills in certain details and provides a great deal of information such as the length of time the animals spent traveling back and forth, etc. The parts in which the narration ascribes human qualities and emotions to the penguins, which I think it's what you disliked but correct me if otherwise, are not very lengthy. They can be easily ignored though yes, I admit, I didn't mind them as much as you did.

[Chris Knipp]

Okay, the story is not the narration. The story is more complex than that. But you can't "easily ignore" stuff in a narration that you strongly disagree with. You can only not mind the parts of the narration because you have a certain sympathy for them, although they may go a bit further than you'd go.

But I feel that animals are very different from humans and from each other, and that we've lost our place in nature from trying to dominate it, replacing respect for wild animals and nature with alternatively fetishizing them or ignoring them, rather than leaving them in their places and honoring them as beyond our right to dominate, adopt, or co-opt. I believe in honoring and trying to understand our differences from the wild animals and our current separation from authenntic nature, and not smoothing everything over with humanizing phrases.

This is why I liked Herzog's Grizzly Man, for pointing out the fallacy of considering wild bears cuddly and loveable. Herzog shows that such fetishizing of the wild is dangerous as well as inaccurate.

The narration, like the caption to a cartoon, makes all the difference in how we respond. You can write your own captions in your head. But you can't then say it was a good cartoon, as long as you "easily ignored" the dumb caption.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp posted:

But I feel that animals are very different from humans and from each other, and that we've lost our place in nature from trying to dominate it, replacing respect for wild animals and nature with alternatively fetishizing them or ignoring them, rather than leaving them in their places and honoring them as beyond our right to dominate, adopt, or co-opt. I believe in honoring and trying to understand our differences from the wild animals and our current separation from authenntic nature, and not smoothing everything over with humanizing phrases.

Mr. Knipp demonstrates with his statements in regards to a good sensitivity of the role of human aggrandizement to the expense of the non-human experienceThe March of the Penguins. As a documentary, such movie genre have a higher level of expectation of an ethical and cinematic requirement that fictional depictions or dramatic films. Mr. Knipp's enlightened viewpoint is well worth listening to, particularly with the threat of man's continued destruction threatens not only this world but ourselves as well.

[oscar jubis]

1. 2046 (Wong Kar Wai/China)
....THE WORLD (Jia Zhang Ke/China)
...THE HOLY GIRL (Lucrecia Martel/Argentina)
3. HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE (Hayao Miyazaki/Japan)
....INNOCENCE (Lucile Hadzihalilovic/Bel-Fra)
....KINGS AND QUEEN (Arnaud Desplechin/France)
....NOT ON THE LIPS (Alain Resnais/France)
....TROPICAL MALADY (Apichatpong Weerasethakul/Thailand)
....SARABAND (Ingmar Bergman/Sweden)
10 CAFE LUMIERE (Hou Hsiao Hsien/Taiwan-Japan)
....MACHUCA (Andres Wood/Chile)
....UP AND DOWN (Jan Hrebejk/Czech Republic)
....THE WEEPING MEADOW (Theo Angelopoulos/Greece)

The Next 10

L'Intrus/The Intruder
The Friend
Look at Me
Whisky
The Hand (WKW's segment from Eros)
The Ninth Day
Gilles' Wife
The Dark Side of the Moon
Story of Marie and Julien
Turtles Can Fly

Honorable Mention

Cache, Memories of Murder, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Nobody Knows, Downfall, Drifters, The Best of Youth, Or (My Treasure), The Edukators, Days of Santiago

Foreign & Undistributed Faves of 2004 (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=9013#post9013)

[Chris Knipp]

Interesting list, of course, odd in some ways...Is a US list coming soon?

Your bottom link doesn't seem to work.

I'm about to watch The World. Some people say they don't like it as much as either Platform or Unknown Pleasures. I don't think I ever heard of Not on the Lips before. Of course Kings and Queen has had great buzz on the East Coast. I don't think anybody saw it out here except at the SFIFF, where I saw it. Definitely a feast of interesting actors, though I found it self-indulgent--see my April 2005 review (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=408). I will stick by my comment "wildly unedited" (mayby "underedited" would be a better way to put it), but with Amalric, Deneuve, Devos, et al. you can't go wrong. 2046 definitely has to be in any top ten for the year. Cafe Lumiere compltely disappointed me. Gilles' Wife -- has anybody seen it here? I haven't heard of it showing here, but I saw it in Paris in 2004 and now have a French DVD of it. Again, fine actors, though I find the film itself somehow limited. Clovis Cornillac is one to watch, hardly known here perhaps but a big talent -- I've talked about that before.

[wpqx]

Not on the Lips was Alain Resnais last film I believe, and I thought it came out awhile ago, but maybe it just wasn't available where Oscar was at. I don't want to get your hopes up too high for The World Christ, but it was in my top ten of last year, and if I ranked my favorite foreign films of 2005, it would top the list.

Luckily Best of Youth has come out on DVD, so I will be picking it up relatively soon, even if it has no special features.

[Chris Knipp]

Not on....etc.--I don't know why I never heard of it but it appears to have had virtually no US distribution; however Rosenbaum reviewed (http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2005/0305/050318.html) it and called it a masterpice, plus when it came out in 2003 it got some serious Cesars including best supporting actor best film and best director.

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
Interesting list, of course, odd in some ways...Is a US list coming soon?

I'd have to guess at what you find odd about my list but I'm glad you find it interesting. All the films listed had official US distribution in 2005. What may be odd is my inclusion of two films whose distributors decided not to release theatrically but straight-to-DVD: NOT ON THE LIPS and STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN. Like Michael Atkinson argued in the Village Voice, it is sad that the distributors don't believe the latest films by veteran Nouvelle Vague directors Resnais and Rivette would suceed in theatres. It's even more sad for critics to ignore these releases just because their distribution did not include theatres.

I've been so busy with two or three per day press screenings that I've not been able to post English-language list. There are several films there you didn't much care for, based on our exchanges during 2005.

Your bottom link doesn't seem to work.

Thanks for pointing this out. I've made needed corrections.

I'm about to watch The World. Some people say they don't like it as much as either Platform or Unknown Pleasures.

Jia Zhang Ke is the best director to emerge from China in the past 15 years. I like all four of his films I've seen. Platform probably my favorite, but The World may be more relevant to westerners because it's dealing with a capitalist revolution to which we can easily relate.

Of course Kings and Queen has had great buzz on the East Coast. I don't think anybody saw it out here except at the SFIFF, where I saw it.

The major papers in the Bay Area, Portland and Seattle reeviewed it, so it played in those markets. Maybe you were out of town when it did.

Cafe Lumiere compltely disappointed me.

What Hou is doing is rather complex and interesting. Rosenbaum has called it "a two-way mirror" in that it's a Taiwanese director using the visual motifs of a Japanese director (Ozu) to examine how Japanese society has changed since Ozu's heyday. The protagonist is a Japanese woman whose returned from Taiwan pregnant from a liasion with a Taiwanese student. Her obsession is the music of a Taiwanese musician who spent the 1920s and 1930s in Japan (when Taiwan was a colony of Japan) composing the pieces that make up the film's soundtrack. There are several quite interesting "rhymes", cultural mostly, that are fun to explore.

Gilles' Wife -- has anybody seen it here? I haven't heard of it showing here, but I saw it in Paris in 2004 and now have a French DVD of it.

I'm glad you do. For some reason, it seemed not to have played in major West Coast cities. Ms. Devos has become one of my very favorite actors working anywhere. The film was officially released in the US in November.

[Chris Knipp]

A three-per-day press screening schedule sounds rough but I hope you manage to post your English list soon anyway without losing your pace, so we can see it before this whole Top Ten thing starts to seem old.

No, it wasn't anything about details of release that made me think your list was "odd." It's just that the stuff I picked seemed -- to me anyway -- more emotionally involving and gut-wrenching. I didn't pay much attention to the "rhymes" and intellectually "interesting" aspects when I listed my annual favorites. This is why I like Unknown Pleasures more than Platform or The World---and The World is a sign Jia may be drifting away from his own gut feelings and doing less personal more theoretical work, along with the public funding.

It doesn't do any good for you to lecture me about Cafe Lumiere and quote good old Jonathan Rosenbaum. I admire him, as I admire you, but as often find his choices weird as I agree with them. Even ardent fans of Hou Hsiao Hsien like Kevin Lee in Senses of Cinema (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/06/38/nyff2005.html) (in his NYFF roundup) are expressing a fear that Hou's current views of contemporary life "risk being as empty as their objects" (even more true of Millennium Mambo and the last part of Three Times).

No, I didn't mean Kings and Queens was not shown here but just that there seemed to be no positive buzz about it here--and I wonder if this area is capable of having a buzz about a sophisticated film like that.

Devos is not just "interesting" but real and cool. I like The Beat My Heart Skipped (which she's in of course, if not at the center) much more than Gilles's Wife, I love the anxiety and intensity of it. The other one seems ike a deterministic kind of romance. I don't like stories where a main character seems doomed from the start. But I saw Gilles the previous year so I wasn't thinking of it. I keep putting in plugs for Clovis Cornillac. Now I'm also beginning to notice Matthieu Amalric who was so prominent in Rois et reine -- and he may be more noticed here now, for sure, after being in Munich, though Cronillac was in Jeunet's Long Engagement. Doesn't he get more screen time in Kings and Queen than Devos? What did you think of the big black woman shrink? That film was too much, in both good and bad senses. I'm a bit too much of a minimalist to be entirely satisifed by it but I can understand why people think Desplechin's a genius. He agrees.

Where you and I may agree more is that some of the best films we saw were not released. I didn't think so at first, but the unreleased in the US Regulier Lovers by Philippe Garrel, which Kevin Lee wisely dwelt upon, just sticks in your head -- and I guess your heart. Anyway though it may have seemed boring at the time, it's powerful cinema. And Sokurov's The Sun--heartrending and lovely. Dardennes' The Child--great. Cristi Piuiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu -- terrific. All not yet released, and two without distributors. Marie et Julien did get reviews, by the way, that you can find online. DVD's get reviewed quite quickly and rather well, it seems, nowadays. This of course is new -- as are DVD's. Aquerello in Strictly Film School (http://www.filmref.com/) , DVD Talk (http://www.dvdtalk.com/) , the apparently tireless Nick Schrager (http://www.nickschager.com/) and Sam Adams of the Philidelphia City Paper [their site seems to be down now] have provided me with good DVD-related reviews recently but you may know more about this than I do.

[Chris Knipp]

I don't know where this should go but Jacque Audiard's De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté/The Beat My Heart Skipped won the main César awards in France, (http://www.allocine.fr/festival/ficheedition_gen_cedition=18350552&cfestival=128.html) , which were announced this week--best film, best director, best supporting actor (Niels Arrestrup), best photography, best editing, best adaptation -- though Romain Duris was nominated, but was passed over for best actor in favor of Michel Bosquet, who won just four years ago. .Darwin's Nightmare got best first film. Caché, which won big in the European Film Awards (http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Awards/European_Film_Awards/), had three nominations at the Césars, but didn't win anything.

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
I hope you manage to post your English list soon anyway

Tomorrow night most likely.

the stuff I picked seemed -- to me anyway -- more emotionally involving and gut-wrenching.

Out of my top 8, three would qualify as "emotionally involving and gut-wrenching" as far as my personal reaction to them. These are 2046, Saraband, and Kings and Queen. The listing of others indicate there are other features and qualities of movies I love other than "gut-wrenching". Cafe Lumiere is certainly NOT that.

It doesn't do any good for you to lecture me about Cafe Lumiere and quote good old Jonathan Rosenbaum.

I'm explaining why I liked it enough to list at #9. I couldn't find a better description of the film than a "2-way mirror" so I had to credit JR because it's his term.

I wonder if this area is capable of having a buzz about a sophisticated film like that.

That's quite interesting. Obviously I wouldn't know. I didn't find Kings sophisticated like say...Tropical Malady, which is truly avant-garde. I think of Kings as a "movie-movie".

What did you think of the big black woman shrink?

Like the director explained, she belongs to the half of the movie that is almost pure comedy, before his story joins hers and becomes something else altogether.

I didn't think so at first, but the unreleased in the US Regulier Lovers by Philippe Garrel, which Kevin Lee wisely dwelt upon, just sticks in your head -- and I guess your heart. Anyway though it may have seemed boring at the time, it's powerful cinema. And Sokurov's The Sun--heartrending and lovely. Dardennes' The Child--great. Cristi Piuiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu -- terrific. All not yet released, and two without distributors.

Garrel's doesn't have a distributor. I thought all the other ones did? I liked L'Enfant, which I believe it's being titled "The Son" and not "The Child" for American release, which to me leaves open the possibility that the title refers also to the baby's childish and immature young dad.

[Chris Knipp]

I wasn't referring to the Dardennes' L'Enfant/The Child, but to Sokurov's The Sun. L'Enfant doesn't mean "The Son." For sure Jérémie Rénier's character isn't a very grown up dad. The Sun (Solntse) has no distributor; L'Enfant had one last fall already. Apropos of Regular Lovers, which is beautiful and sticks in the mind but would be understandably offputting to any audience with its extreme length and low level of event, Louis Garrell got the César for best new male actor for his starring role in that film, but as I mentioned, and I regret this fact because I am particularly fond of this film and this performance, Romain Duris got nominated for Best Actor but was passed over for the actual award. Maybe it will turn out to be good that he will "stay hungry."

"Gut-wrenching" was too strong a word to use. I just meant to emphasize that I am influenced by my purely emotional response to movies, but that can be defined, or caused, in so many different ways; obviously if those three you mentioned deeply affected you emotionally, you responded differently from me to Saraband, Kings and Queen, and 2046. You know already Saraband didn't get me deep down. Kings and Queen, with its meandering structure, never ceases to be interesting but I don't see how it can be emotionally affecting, not for me. A lot of it is about sadness and emotional disturbance, but a lot of it is in the head, including probably the "almost pure comedy" you and Desplechin seem to share a sense of. As for 2046, a deep aesthetic pleasure can be emotionally affecting, no doubt, but the swoony, romantic, nostalgic, self-reflexive stylized (not to say over-produced) nature of it puts it, for me, at one remove from direct gut emotion. I love it, but I can't even recommend it to anybody because unless they're already a Wong fan, I'm not sure they'll get into it.

"Avant garde" and "sophisticated" aren't the same thing. A lot of avant garde stuff is pretty naive, it seems, and it's probably also true that the most sophisticated stuff is often not very adventurous structurally or politically or socially. Kings and Queen, with its elaborate narrrative and its panoply of western European cultural allusions, not to mention oddball pop music references, as well as its posh haute-bourgeois population, strikes me as very sophisticated material, whereas Tropical Malady, while definitely avant garde, is if anything a bit on the naive and innocent side and the mythical/religious second half is a voyage into the primitive, not the sophisticated.

I know you didn't mean to be lecturing me on Cafe Lumiere, but it simply sounded that way. It's not the mention of Mr. Rosenbaum. He's a man of sterling character and deep knowledge but he can seem a bit naive too, as when in the elevator he told Ebert he was still puzzling after five viewings what the ending of Jia's The World "means." But I have to admire him for keeping that kind of awe and puzzlement.

[oscar jubis]

1.. YES (Sally Potter/UK)
2.. A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (David Cronenberg/USA)
.....BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (Ang Lee/USA)
.....CAPOTE (Bennett Miller/USA-Canada)
.....KING KONG (Peter Jackson/USA-New Zealand)
.....THE NEW WORLD (T. Malick/USA)
.....PALINDROMES (Todd Solondz/USA)
.....SEPARATE LIES (Julian Fellowes/UK)
.....THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (Tommy L. Jones/USA-France)
10. MASTERS OF HORROR: HOMECOMING (Joe Dante/USA)
.....ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (Miranda July/USA)

The Next 10

Breakfast on Pluto (tied)
Mysterious Skin
Broken Flowers (tied)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Constant Gardener
Good Night and Good Luck
The Squid and the Whale
Syriana
Thumbsucker
The White Countess

Honorable Mention
Cinderella Man, Nine Lives, Dear Frankie, Millions, Lord of War, The Girl from Monday, Where The Truth Lies, Kingdom of Heaven, My Summer of Love

[oscar jubis]

Favorite Documentaries of 2005 (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=14630#post14630)
Favorite DVD releases of 2005 (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=14388#post14388)
Favorite Undistributed Films of 2005 (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=14404#post14404)

Favorite English-language films of 2004 (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=9019#post9019)

[wpqx]

I don't know if I'm surprised or disappointed that you and I had no similar films in our top tens this year Oscar. If I had excluded foreign films from my top ten, then King Kong would have made it and therefore we would see eye to eye on at least one, but quite a conflicting set of opinions on last year's offerings. Overall, I'd say last year did offer quite a few worthy films, and there are several films in your list that would be in the "bubbling under" category or honorable mentions if you would. Your 2004 list on the other hand is not remarkably far off from mine.

[Chris Knipp]

We have some strong differences, but some strong agreements. You know I have avoided Yes and I guess I was put off from seeing Palindromes. I guess I'd have to admit King Kong just wasn't to my taste at all. I think History of Violence is overrated but I'm out on a limb in thinking that; all the hip critics and fans mention it, or even put it first. Anyway it is one that has to be seen -- and discussed. I like the majority of your choices, and would consider them among the 2005 films that had to be seen. Certainly we have quite different tastes as indicated by those differences, but we consider the same films when we make our choices. I don't think two people ever agree, and if they did it would be boring. We have previously disagreed on You and Me and Everyone. But I'm glad to see Brokeback, Capote, The New world (interesting and beautiful, even though I was ultimately disappointed), and Three Burials (though I saw it just recently and was satisfied to let my lists stand). I didn't see Separate Lies, partly because it was panned, secondarily because it just wasn't around long. Your next ten are all worthy, though I'm a bit surprised to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As you can see from my lists I particularly like Mysterious Skin, Good Night...and Thumbsucker, and you know I liked The White Countess, The Squid and the Whale, and Syriana, even though I didn't rate them quite as high as you did. I can't quite see a pattern, but actually I think we agree on a lot, even though where we put them in order is different. And that's pretty normal.

I've already commented favorably on your documentary list. DVD's isn't a category I have considered. Except for Los Muertos and Stray Dogs I haven't seen your undistributed, just as you haven't seen some of mine that I think you may love. The other list -- that's 2004 and I don't know why you put it here. Again I agree on some, and strongly disagree on a few.

[oscar jubis]

Chris and wpqx, thank you for your comments.

*It's time to reveal that I haven't seen some films on your lists. I missed Down to the Bone and 40 Shades of Blue. These did not or have not opened here: The Intruder, Innocence, Games of Love and Chance, and The Weeping Meadow (I'm a big fan of Mr. Angelopoulos, btw).

*Although not included on my list, I did enjoy some from wpqx's list: Sin City, Serenity, and Pride and Prejudice. For some reason, I am a bit surprised A History of Violence is not on your list. Curious as to your opinion. I most definitely did not like Crash or Last Days (which Chris also listed). I actually found the former borderline offensive and extremely crude conceptually.

*I've printed Chris' undistributed list to make sure I don't miss any opportunity to watch them if I get the opportunity, either at theatres or at home.

*I had Me and You... outside the Top 10 but a second viewing increased my appreciation for it. I happen to like it even more now than when we discussed it in these forums.

*Notice that Syriana, The White Countess and The Squid... are tied with others at #13. Very good movies, but not masterful or without flaws and limitations, in my opinion.

*Separate Lies received what I'd call "mixed reviews". Some prominent crits liked it a lot. It's a conventional film, but a particularly well-written one and features excellent performances. Fans of Woody's Brit-set film ought to check it out.

[HorseradishTree]

I didn't exactly create a list. I tend to pick one film that rises above the rest, and then mix all the other great ones together.

My pick for the best is King Kong. The sheer emotion that Jackson managed to convey on the screen caught me completely off guard and left me in tears. I hate to love this flick. How could a remake of a film that was already remade be so--beyond what it should be? I'm always at a loss for words when I talk about it. It's an homage to the original as well as a wave-in to the new era of cinematic beauty. I know that that's a pretty strong statement, but I really do feel very greatly for this film.

Crash is a film that truly speaks to everyone. Some may call it derivative and predictable, but for me the emotion it conveyed moved me. People put it off as simply stating that "Racism is bad." I feel it's so much more personal than that; it explores diversity as well as the common bonds that bring together all of humanity, no matter how negative.

Batman Begins was great for us fans. It made the story much darker and held its own in terms of originality.

Sin City was wonderful not only for its style, but for its precision structure. It followed the novels to a T and still brought something new to it.

Grizzly Man is the first film of Werner Herzog's that I've actually seen. If I were to pick only two films this year, this would be right alongside Kong. It was a powerful documentary that essentially offered you two opinions on life and pretty much allowed you to make your own input. I don't think Timothy Treadwell was insane; he was doing exactly what he made of life, and for that I admire him. He was aware of the risks and knew what he was doing, so I think people should stop knocking on him. Social ineptitude might have been his greatest flaw, perhaps.

Good Night, and Good Luck was so subtle and quiet that I was surprised at how much it struck me. I've always been a devout anti-McCarthyist, and I never knew about Murrow's legacy in this fashion. It's a tribute to what journalism can accomplish, which, sadly, doesn't appear to be a height that anyone can achieve today.

The Constant Gardener worked really well because of its mastery with the non-linear narrative. It certainly wasn't underrated in the international community, but I was surprised at the lack of support from many folks in America. I just hope it somewhat withstands the tests of time.

People seem to be just getting swept up in the notion of being topical and important, which isn't always what makes a great film. Sure, some of them worked, but the tsunami of importance that swept through Hollywood last year got fairly irritating; almost smug.

[Chris Knipp]

i just want you to know that I read this and that we have a couple of strong points in common. I like what you said about Good Night, and Good Luck. And I'm impressed that you rate Grizzly Man so high--I also think it was one of the important movies of the year, one that says important things.

Oscar's preceding post mention of Crash has a sadder resonance in view of how the Academy Awards turned out.

[oscar jubis]

Thanks for your input, H. Tree.
*Now there's three of us who have listed King Kong as a Top 10 film. I thought it was the year's high point as far as movies-as-spectacle. I enjoyed Batman Begins, and I found Sin City worth watching purely because of visual style.
*Your comments regarding Good Night and Good Luck lead me to believe you'd appreciate the doc Point of Order about the McCarthy/Army hearings. It's out on dvd.
*Grizzly Man and Constant Gardener are also very good films. There are several Herzog docs available on video which you'd probably like also.
*I hated Crash for several reasons. Actually I have more arguments against it now than when I posted about it back in May. I don't know that we want to resume the discussion though.

[tabuno]

Loved Crash as one of the best movies of 2005.

Didn't like King Kong, Batman Begins, Constant Gardener.

I can only agree with Sin City and Good Night and Good Luck.

[HorseradishTree]

Originally posted by oscar jubis
*Your comments regarding Good Night and Good Luck lead me to believe you'd appreciate the doc Point of Order about the McCarthy/Army hearings. It's out on dvd.


What's that one flick called with Woody Allen about the Hollywood blacklist? I've never seen it, but it sounds intriguing.

[Chris Knipp]

The Front, 1976.

[oscar jubis]

I've had the opportunity last night to watch an outstanding documentary that had a limited release in the USA during 2005.
I've added it to my TOP 10 Docs list.

It's called ANOTHER ROAD HOME. It was directed by Danae Elon, daughter of Israeli author Amos Elon, an ardent protester of the Occupation and the policies of the Israeli government, now living in exile in Tuscany. The film is about the director's search for the Palestinian man who took care of her from age 2 to her late teens, when the Elons lived in Jerusalem. Danae Elon tracks down "Musa"'s sons in Patterson, New Jersey whom she calls her "shadow brothers". Elon tracks down Musa in Palestine and he travels to the USA where the two families reunite. The film falls into the category of personal documentary but it explores the concept of homeland, and issues regarding the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a fresh perspective. The film is not available on dvd as of now.

The SUNDANCE Channel is doing an excellent job of broadcasting otherwise unavailable fiction and documentary films. For example, tonight they are showing a now obscure film Isabelle Huppert made in
Russia called Novodneniye AKA The Flood.

[Chris Knipp]

I saw previews for that here so it was shown in the Bay Area but I missed it. For sure it was shown in NYC of course. Never heard of the Huppert Russian project. I find her much better in French, though.

I thought I answered the question about that one flick called with Woody Allen about the Hollywood blacklist but it didn't get on, maybe I didn't push the SUBMIT button.

The answer would be The Front (1976).

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
Never heard of the Huppert Russian project. I find her much better in French, though.

The Flood aka Novodneniye (according to Imdb) turned out to be a major discovery. The film, or at least the version shown in the Sundance Channel, is in French. The director, the source novel, and the whole cast and crew are Russian. But my wife and I agreed that the two Russian actors that have major roles are definitely speaking French, with minor characters probably dubbed (expertly). Great cinematography by DP Vladimir Pankov, who lensed Kira Muratova's masterpiece THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME. Excellent perf by Huppert who's playing the type of role she likes. She's a woman driven to madness by repressed jealousy and sexual neglect.

[oscar jubis]

Yearly lists of best or favorite films released in a given year are never set in stone because even the most diligent filmgoers living in big film markets miss a good movie when it plays in theatres (and because second viewings can change one's opinion of a film's merit). This is particularly true of foreign films because they tend to have shorter runs and because many titles play only in NYC and LA. So here are two additions to my foreign-language list of favorites officially released in 2005. I had to wait for the dvd release of L'Intrus (The Intruder) to have access to it. The second film finally opened at a theatre here two weeks ago.

L'Intrus (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1618) written and directed by Claire Denis. Link to a discussion of the film bet. C. Knipp and myself.
The Weeping Meadow (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1555) by Theo Angelopoulos. Link to a review by wpqx of this first part of a trilogy about 20th Century Greek history depicted by using the conventions of classic Greek tragedy.

Updated Favorite Foreign-language Films of 2005 (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=14674#post14674)